SOURCE: Rosenberg, Karen. “Trediakovsky on Sumarokov: The Critical Issues.” Russian Literature Triquarterly 21 (1988): 49-60.

In the essay that follows, Rosenberg analyzes the conflict between Trediakovsky and Alexander Sumarokov in the context of the literary and academic culture of eighteenth-century Russia.

In the late 1740s and early 1750s, Vasily Trediakovsky and Alexander Sumarokov engaged in a series of discussions on matters of languages and literature. According to earlier scholars such as P. O. Morozov and N. N. Bulich, the principal source of the conflict was the pugnaciousness of both parties. This point of view implies that Trediakovsky and Sumarokov did not articulate consistent positions but, rather, flung accusations largely at random and blamed each other for mistakes which each of them made in his own literary practice. The more recent work of I. Z. Serman, however, has shown that the two eighteenth-century rivals had a significant disagreement over the role...